[unreadable] The high degree of specialization within ophthalmology has limited the flow of information and ideas from other disciplines. Motivated by the fact that many blinding diseases have mechanistically related pathologies in other organ systems, a diverse group of experts drawn from both vision and non-vision sciences, primarily from Harvard Medical School, propose to form a cluster of interdisciplinary teams to identify new strategies for addressing a spectrum of blinding eye diseases. Teams will be formed around cellular and molecular mechanisms that lead to blindness, but that also have corollary disease processes in other organ systems. The mechanisms include disordered angiogenesis, dysregulated inflammation, aberrant wound healing, and microbial toxin-induced pathology. The overall goal of this effort is to develop novel hypotheses to explain the pathogenesis of blinding eye diseases for which no cures or treatments now exist, and to design an Interdisciplinary Center to pursue these hypotheses. This goal will be achieved by accomplishing the following: 1) For Year 1 the goal is to develop a set of new hypotheses for the pathogenesis of blinding eye diseases resulting from disordered angiogenesis, dysregulated inflammation, aberrant wound healing, and microbial toxin-induced pathology. This will be accomplished via a series of large and small workshops that will bring together scientists of varied disciplines. A large symposium will assemble top experts in research on blinding eye diseases, and in corollary diseases, to acquaint each other with the current state of knowledge. This meeting will be followed by smaller, more specialized exploratory workshops to allow in depth discussion of the similarities and differences between ocular diseases and their non-ocular counterparts, with particular emphasis on their multifactorial pathogenesis. 2) In Year 2 the workshop format will be used to identify pilot projects to be conducted to test the validity of hypotheses advanced. There will be focus on identifying emerging technologies and educational workshops will be organized to bring these new technologies to the problem of blinding diseases of the eye. 3) During Year 3 results of the pilot projects will be reviewed and validity of the hypotheses assessed in order to identify cross cutting interdisciplinary programs that are most likely to advance knowledge on the pathogenesis of blinding diseases. Based on these findings, an application for an Interdisciplinary Center for Research on Blinding Eye Diseases will be prepared. [unreadable] [unreadable]